The Hell-Raiser

Steve Dunleavy, a tabloid legend, wages a crusade to defend the indefensible.

The New York Post columnist Steve Dunleavy keeps a desk just off the paper’s newsroom, in an anonymous skyscraper on Sixth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, but Langan’s, an Irish bar just down the block, is his real office. The hostelry provides him with an answering service (“Sorry, he’s not in yet, but he should be in later,” I was told one afternoon when I called), space and privacy to conduct interviews, freedom to consume unlimited Parliament Lights (Andrea Peyser, a fellow-columnist who sits near Dunleavy at the Post, objects to his smoking), a willing audience for his monologues, copious amounts of alcohol, and decent food. Dunleavy, who is sixty-two, makes use of all these amenities on a regular basis, except the last one. In the five years that he has been going to Langan’s, according to one employee, he has been spotted eating just once—a bowl of onion soup, ordered, quite possibly, in error. The ability to subsist on a diet largely restricted to alcohol and tobacco adds to the rakish image Dunleavy has cultivated during almost half a century in the news business, and so does his face, which is creased like an old pair of leather shoes. One evening earlier this summer, I walked into Langan’s and picked him out at his favorite booth, a quiet one by the men’s room. I hadn’t seen Dunleavy much since 1995, when I quit the Post, where I had been an editor for a couple of years, but he had changed little. He was smartly dressed, in a gray three-piece suit, white monogrammed shirt with French cuffs, gold cufflinks, red silk tie, and shiny black shoes. His pallor was that of a rotting cod. His silver pompadour, which makes him resemble an aging Elvis impersonator, shot from his crown in glorious defiance of taste and gravity.

Facing Dunleavy across the table were two burly younger men with thick necks, buzz-cut hair, slim mustaches, and tiny goatees. They were both dressed in sneakers and bluejeans, and had tight T-shirts stretched across their biceps. They even had the same first name: Thomas Bruder and Thomas Wiese. “Hello, mate, say hello to a couple of faggot cops,” Dunleavy said in a thick Australian accent when I went over and introduced myself. I ordered a beer and sat down. Dunleavy was drinking a vodka-and-tonic. His companions were devouring cheeseburgers.

Bruder and Wiese, who both live on Long Island, used to be cops in the Seventieth Precinct, in Brooklyn. Their police careers effectively ended in the early morning of August 9, 1997, when Abner Louima, a Haitian immigrant, was beaten and sodomized with a broken broom handle in a bathroom at the precinct’s station house. Justin Volpe, a pug-faced former colleague of Bruder and Wiese’s, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting Louima and is serving thirty years in prison. Bruder and Wiese, who were both on duty when the attack took place, were convicted earlier this year of lying to investigators in order to cover up the role played by another cop, Charles Schwarz, who has been found guilty of holding down Louima while Volpe attacked him. Before coming to Langan’s to meet Dunleavy, Bruder and Wiese had seen their lawyers about their sentencing, which was due to take place a few weeks later. “They told us to pack our sneakers,” Bruder said grimly. “We’re going down.” Dunleavy looked even glummer than Bruder and Wiese. “You guys are going to jail and it breaks my heart,” he muttered into his cocktail.

Dunleavy has written dozens of columns professing the innocence of Bruder, Wiese, and Schwarz, who is already in jail. He has also invited Bruder and Wiese to his house, in Lido Beach, Long Island, cooked them steaks, handed them beers, and, after they left, called up their lawyers and harangued them for not doing enough. “He’s the angel,” Wiese told me without a hint of irony. “He’s the only guy in the last three years who has had the guts to write the truth. I keep all of Steve’s articles in a scrapbook, not for me but for my kids. When they say, ‘What’s going on, Dad?’ I say, ‘Read these articles, because this is the truth.’” Dunleavy seemed grateful for this tribute. “If I thought for one minute that these guys were guilty, I’d run a mile,” he said. According to Dunleavy’s version of events, Volpe carried out the brutal assault by himself, and the other cops in the Seventieth Precinct were innocent bystanders. Two juries have rejected this story, but Dunleavy repeated it again in the Post two days later in another column about Bruder and Wiese. “These guys did nothing, zilch,” he wrote. And he went on:

**{: .break one} ** It is so easy to indict a cop, lock him or her up, on the merest allegation, and pronounce you’re doing your civic duty. It’s a filthy crying shame, and one day society will suffer for this idiocy. **

Bruder and Wiese are by no means the only cops whom Dunleavy has defended in his longshoreman’s English in recent years. Others include the four police officers involved in the shooting of Amadou Diallo; Tom Kennedy, a Harlem sergeant charged with assaulting a suspect; Vincent Davis, a Bronx transit cop who was jailed for obstructing justice; and Patricia Feerick, a lieutenant who was convicted of conducting an illegal drug raid in East Harlem. Dunleavy’s emergence as the N.Y.P.D.’s most fervent supporter—even Mayor Giuliani criticizes the department occasionally—is the latest twist in a career that began ten thousand miles away, on the copy desk of the Sydney Sun, in 1952. Dunleavy is one of the most notorious tabloid journalists of his generation, a self-styled conservative antihero renowned for drinking, brawling, and seducing his way across three continents. He joined the Post in the nineteen-seventies, shortly after Rupert Murdoch bought the paper. A decade later, he switched to Murdoch’s fledgling Fox television network and worked on “A Current Affair,” a garish nightly news magazine. Dunleavy was accused then of trying to debase not merely one media outlet but an entire culture of broadcast journalism. Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s television critic, called Dunleavy “a sleaze.” To the Times, “A Current Affair” was “nothing short of vile.” The apotheosis of Dunleavy-bashing came in 1994, when Oliver Stone, the Hollywood film director, used him as a model for Wayne Gale, the repulsive tabloid hack in “Natural Born Killers.”

Dunleavy has never paid much heed to what he once termed the “tweed jacket and pipe” crowd. He returned to the Post in 1995, and by this time the lurid, personality-driven brand of journalism he helped create had become a growth industry, encompassing everything from People to “Dateline NBC.” With so many journalists covering tabloid news, Dunleavy needed a new role. He found it in acting as the public defender of accused cops and other politically incorrect causes, such as smoking and gun ownership. After Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed black man, was shot dead by a cop outside a midtown bar earlier this year, even the Post’s editorial page, the most conservative in the city, criticized the police department’s release of Dorismond’s juvenile arrest record; Dunleavy refused to do likewise.

“Do I write bad things about cops? No. There are better reporters than me who can do that,” he said when I asked about his response to the Dorismond case. “If a reporter like Liz Smith continually, accurately, and decently is a champion of gays and lesbians, what is wrong with me being the champion for the most beaten-up minority in the freakin’ world?” he went on. “Now, the critics who say, ‘You are a Johnny One Note,’ they have a point, I admit that. But there hasn’t been a Johnny One Note in history to stick up for the cops—cops who are shot at, attacked, pissed on, and reviled by everybody. The peculiar thing is it turned out to be a foreigner.”

Dunleavy was born in Sydney’s Bondi Beach in 1938. His attitudes still reflect his upbringing in a city that was, in some ways, a small-scale replica of the old New York he idolizes. Sydney in the nineteen-forties and fifties was a white, working-class city, with lots of crime and violence, but also with a clear division between law-abiding citizens and criminals, one largely unencumbered by race. Dunleavy grew up in a tough neighborhood, where he developed a lifelong fascination with hoodlums. “There were the Reilly brothers, the Ferguson family, and Pretty Boy Walker, who got machine-gunned at Peter’s Corner,” he told me during one of several encounters at Langan’s. “I knew them all pretty well.” Dunleavy lived with his parents, his grandmother, and his uncle Bill, a First World War veteran whose hand was blown off at Flanders. “We may have been broke, but I didn’t know I was broke,” Dunleavy said. “We always had dogs and cats, and stuff like that. And lots of smoking and drinking. Lots of it. No doubt about that.’’

Dunleavy’s father was a photographer for the Sydney Sun, a local tabloid. At fourteen, Dunleavy left school and joined his dad’s paper as a copyboy. Soon after, he moved to the rival Sydney Daily Mirror, and in 1954 he was made a cub reporter. The Australian tabloids were modelled on their scrappy British equivalents, with endless space devoted to crime, sports, and gossip. Competition for stories was fierce, and few tactics were barred in their pursuit. Reporters moved around town with their own drivers and photographers. “I lost count of the number of times I posed as a cop, a public servant or a funeral director,” Dunleavy later told William Shawcross, Murdoch’s biographer. Dunleavy started on the crime desk, and it was there that he first came into daily contact with cops. “There was a guy named Ray Kelly, who was head of detectives,” he said to me. “Kelly was from County Kerry—blue eyes, black hair parted in the middle. He liked to bust bad guys, but he thought the courts were too slow, so he would blow their brains out.” Dunleavy stopped and chuckled at the memory. “But he only killed the guilty.”

Even as a cub reporter, Dunleavy would go to any lengths to get his byline published. Once at a night club, he approached Ava Gardner and she threw a glass of champagne in his face. Dunleavy returned to the office and wrote a story that began, “Last night, I shared a glass of champagne with Ava Gardner. She threw it; I wore it.” Another time, Dunleavy found himself competing against his father on a story about hikers lost in the Blue Mountains, north of Sydney. According to the folklore that surrounds him, Dunleavy let the air out of the tires on his father’s car in order to prevent the Sun from beating the Mirror to the scoop. Dunleavy insisted that this tale was “a bit worn around the edges.” “It was the driver—a guy named Curly Bramble—who gave me the shiv. And I didn’t know it was my father’s car.” But Dunleavy’s father held him responsible, and a couple of years later he exacted his revenge.

“There was a horrible criminal called the Kingsgrove Slasher,” Dunleavy recalled. “His thing was to go into the bedroom where a man and wife were sleeping, slash the wife’s breasts, then wait for the husband to wake up before jumping out the window. He liked the chase. It turned out that he was a very good runner for the Botany Harriers.

“One time, the cops thought they had cornered him in a particular area of town. The houses all had laundry rooms outside the back. I went into one, where I thought the Slasher might be hiding. I was determined to catch him single-handedly. Next thing, I hear a dead bolt turn behind me. My father had locked me in. I was trapped for hours. When I got out, I went home and said, ‘Dad, you could have got me fired.’ He said, ‘Remember the Blue Mountains.’”

In 1959, Dunleavy moved to Hong Kong, where he worked for the South China Morning Post. In the ensuing seven years, he freelanced his way through Tokyo, Calcutta (“I nearly starved to death”), Athens, Milan, and Madrid (“Franco was still alive, God bless his soul”). Eventually, he reached Fleet Street, where he worked for United Press International. The job was straightforward, and the famous Fleet Street pubs, such as the Punch, the Mucky Duck, and El Vino’s, were close by, but, what with the rain and the low wages received by English journalists, Dunleavy decided that Swinging London wasn’t for him. “I was getting paid two pounds over the Fleet Street minimum,” he told me. “I’d spend it all in two nights on the piss.” On December 31, 1966, Dunleavy arrived at J.F.K. with, he insists, ten dollars in his pocket. He walked to a coffee shop near the airport, where he met a woman who took him in for a few days. “She’d been an airline stewardess, but that was a long time ago,” he said. The woman gave Dunleavy the taxi fare to the city. He went to the Daily News Building on Forty-second Street, which then housed the New York bureaus of U.P.I. and of Murdoch’s Australian papers. Dunleavy hadn’t worked for Murdoch previously, but with the help of Neal Travis—now a fellow-columnist at the Post—he got some freelance shifts, and after a few months he was offered a full-time job. “That was November, 1967. I’ve worked for the Boss ever since,” he said.

Earlier this summer, I went back to the Post for the first time since I left. When I reached Dunleavy’s cubicle, he was being interviewed by a producer from the History Channel about the Boston Strangler case, a story he covered some thirty years ago. Jack Newfield, the former Village Voice writer, sits next to Dunleavy. Despite opposing political views, the two columnists get on well. “We spend hours talking about the fights,” Newfield, a boxing enthusiast, told me. “We share the same view of Don King, we both like the police, and we’re both interested in gangsters. Also, we’re both basically reporters.” Dunleavy and Andrea Peyser, who sits two cubicles away, get on less well, perhaps because they are duelling conservative voices.

While I was chatting with Newfield, a pasty-faced young man with greasy hair and dark clothes emerged from the newsroom and sidled up to Dunleavy’s desk.

“Ollie, how are you, mate?” Dunleavy shouted to him, breaking away from his interview. “Are they still trying to nail you?”

Ollie turned out to be Oliver Jovanovic, a former Columbia graduate student who was jailed in 1998 for abducting and sexually abusing a young woman he had met on the Internet. The so-called “Cybersex Rape” case, with racy details of bondage and sado-masochism, kept the headline writers at the News and the Post happy for months, but Dunleavy labelled it a farrago from the start. The story offered him the opportunity to lash out at three of his favorite targets: feminists, prosecutors, and judges, all of whom had conspired to imprison an innocent man, he argued. When Jovanovic’s conviction was thrown out on appeal, Dunleavy was triumphant. “The judge fucked up, the prosecution fucked up, and it was all a bunch of shit. That’s it in plain English,” he told me after he had finished his television interview and we had moved across the street to Langan’s. “Ollie didn’t do anything wrong. The woman admitted on the stand that she walked into his room and stripped naked. He didn’t even get laid. Mate, I think he was terrified by her sexual aggressiveness.”

Jovanovic had come to see Dunleavy because the prosecutors were considering a fresh attempt to get his appeal reversed. If they succeeded, he could end up back in the cell where he had spent twenty months. Dunleavy bought Jovanovic a pint of Guinness and promised to read the pile of legal briefs that he had brought along with him. “A lot of people who didn’t go to the trial don’t know what really happened,” Jovanovic said. “He”—Dunleavy—”does.”

That the courts are locking up the wrong people, and not locking up enough of the right ones, is a favorite refrain of Dunleavy and his colleagues on the Post. They have even created a logo, “Junk Justice,” which they regularly attach to pieces about the criminal-justice system. The impact of this barrage is unclear, but some people on the front lines detect casualties. “Steve Dunleavy has no idea of the evil he does in the world,” David Feige, a supervising attorney of the Bronx Defenders, a non-profit group that provides lawyers for poor defendants, said a few weeks back. “I frequently see judges imprisoning black people who should be set free, because they”—the judges—”are frightened of being attacked in the Post.” Former governor Mario Cuomo agrees that the outpourings of Dunleavy and his colleagues sometimes hamper justice. “They treat the judges as politicians, and the result is that some judges act like politicians by trying to please people,” Cuomo said. “That’s the last thing you want to happen.” But Cuomo, who helped save the Post from closure several times, only to have the paper turn against him in the 1994 gubernatorial election, said he didn’t dislike Dunleavy. “In every other way than his aberrant and perverse political opinions, he’s a typical New Yorker,” Cuomo said. “He’s feisty, he’s resilient, he’s self-made, he stands up for what he believes in, and he can even, on occasion, be charming.”

From 1967 to 1973, Dunleavy worked as a New York correspondent for Murdoch’s Australian and British titles, covering the big stories of the day and imparting what is known on Fleet Street as “topspin.” When, in 1969, Ted Kennedy claimed he had swum from Chappaquiddick to Edgartown after fleeing the fatal car accident on the Dyke Bridge, many local people said it couldn’t be done: the currents were too strong. Dunleavy plunged into the sea, crawled his way across the five-hundred-foot channel, and declared it an easy swim, thereby buttressing at least part of Kennedy’s story. After Albert DeSalvo, an imprisoned Massachusetts sex offender, claimed to be the Boston Strangler, Dunleavy interviewed him in jail and pronounced him an impostor.

In 1973, Rupert Murdoch arrived in New York, to launch the National Star (later shortened to the Star), a supermarket tabloid modelled on the immensely profitable National Enquirer. Murdoch was eager to expand his holdings on this side of the Atlantic, but previous attempts to buy a big American publication had been rebuffed, so he decided to found his own. Convinced that most American journalists were hopelessly élitist, he imported some of the streetwise talent he had fostered in Australia and England. Dunleavy became the Star’s news editor and, later, its senior columnist. Murdoch initially acted as his own editor, choosing stories, laying out front pages, and frequently ripping them up at the last minute. His willingness to pay for stories when necessary, a practice frowned on in mainstream journalism, particularly impressed Dunleavy. “When there were buyups, he’d say, ‘Go for it,’” Dunleavy recalled. Murdoch was equally taken with his flamboyant countryman, and the two struck up a friendship that has lasted almost thirty years. “He’s one of the hardest-working journalists I’ve ever seen,” Murdoch told me a few weeks ago, from Los Angeles, where he was receiving radiation treatment for prostate cancer. “He absolutely lives for scoops, and to get his name on them.” When Dunleavy’s father was dying of lung cancer, in 1975, Murdoch made sure Dunleavy was given a round-trip ticket to Sydney and a thousand dollars in cash, a gesture Dunleavy still remembers with gratitude. Murdoch has even tried several times to stop Dunleavy’s drinking, but without much success. “He can be infuriating, but that doesn’t spoil one’s affection for him,” Murdoch said.

The early years at the Star were tough. Murdoch had underestimated the task of distributing a national publication in a country as vast as the United States, and the Star was unavailable in many areas. The turning point came in 1977, when Piers Ackerman, another Australian recruit, learned that Elvis Presley’s former bodyguards might be willing to talk about his drug use in return for money. A fee of a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars was agreed upon, and Dunleavy flew out to California for a series of tell-all interviews. In just two months, he produced “Elvis: What Happened?,” a three-hundred-page book packed with salacious details about Presley’s private life. Serialization of the book in the Star began the very day before Presley was found dead at Graceland. “The circulation went from two million to three million in a week,” Ian Rae, a Fox News executive who was then editor of the Star, recalled. “We never looked back.’’ Dunleavy’s book became a best-seller, but he received only a flat fee of thirty thousand dollars, which he put toward the purchase of the house in Lido Beach. He wasn’t bitter. “Mate, I’ve never had a bad day in journalism in my life,” he said. “You win, you get drunk because you won. You lose, you get drunk because you lost.”

Dunleavy’s fondness for alcohol is a throwback to the days when reporters emerged from John Adams High School, not Princeton, and drank like stevedores, not lawyers. In his early years in New York, he spent a lot of time at Costello’s, a bar on the East Side that was crawling with British and Australian hacks. He was married—first to a fellow Aussie journalist, Yvonne Dunleavy, who ghostwrote “The Happy Hooker,” then to his current wife, Gloria—but domesticity took second place to carousing. On one occasion that has passed into tabloid legend, a group of reporters had gathered at Elaine’s, the media hangout on Second Avenue at Eighty-eighth Street. “It was midwinter, and there was snow everywhere,” George Gordon, a former correspondent for the London Daily Mail, recalled recently. “There was a young Australian journalist who had brought along his fiancée, an attractive Norwegian shipping heiress. She and Dunleavy got into a conversation. Eventually, somebody said, ‘Let’s go to a bar across the street,’ and we all went over. When we got there, everybody in the bar had flocked to this huge picture window. They were watching Dunleavy and the fiancée humping in the snow, arses going up and down. As we were watching, a snowplow came up the street and ran over Dunleavy’s foot. By this time, the entire bar was in uproarious laughter. Dunleavy limped in and rolled down his sock to reveal this big blackened limb. He was so loaded that it didn’t matter, but as the night wore on even he said there was something wrong. We called an ambulance, and he checked into a local hospital. He’d broken his foot.” Antics like this didn’t impress everybody. When somebody relayed the story of Dunleavy’s fracture to Pete Hamill, he replied, “I hope it wasn’t his writing foot.”

One day earlier this summer, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, the main police union, held a rally in Battery Park, which features a memorial for officers killed in the line of duty. By the time I got there, several thousand off-duty cops had gathered to listen to a series of speakers, including Patrick Lynch, the president of the P.B.A., and Andra Schwarz, the wife of the jailed Charles Schwarz. They were carrying posters that said things like “Cops Are People Too!” and “Our Cops: Still the Finest.” I found Dunleavy next to a flatbed truck that was being used as a stage, where he was being treated like a visiting dignitary. A group of cops from the Midtown South command, who were standing nearby, struck up a chorus of “Steve for President.”

The speakers complained that the cops were unappreciated by the public, the media, and even the Mayor. The police union’s contract expired on July 31st, but the Giuliani administration is refusing to give the cops the big raise they think they deserve. Twenty-five years ago, New York cops were among the highest paid in the country. Today, with an average salary of about forty-three thousand dollars, they lag well behind their counterparts in New Jersey and on Long Island. “That’s the core of the current discontent in the department and the lack of pride,” Eddie Burns, a former spokesman for the N.Y.P.D., told me as the speeches continued. “All this other stuff, race and brutality, has been with this force for years. I remember, before I even joined the department, a cop shot a black kid who had a gun and there were riots. They called it a race riot. That was 1965. Thirty-five years ago. We’re reliving the same bullshit now.”

Burns, the father of Ed Burns, the filmmaker, met Dunleavy in 1976, when he was at Police Headquarters downtown and Dunleavy would call from the Post, which was then nearby on South Street. “Steve is really sort of a cop,” Burns said. “He has more friends who are cops than who are journalists.” This may be true. All the same, I had to wonder why an avowed conservative and union-basher would enthusiastically applaud a rabble-rousing speech by the head of the P.B.A., which is what Dunleavy was doing. “These guys are different—they’ve been given a really raw deal,” he explained unconvincingly. In fact, as his column the following day made clear, Dunleavy pursues his pro-cop crusade with little regard for intellectual consistency or balance. After a tear-jerking description of the rally, the column ended:

**{: .break one} ** I get many nasty calls from people—well, punks—threatening my life calling me a cop lover. You think that is an insult? Well, these wackos who called were right. Try dialing 911 the next time you get in trouble—and telling the cops how much you hate them. Right. **

Dunleavy is paid to have strong views, but his refusal to countenance any criticism of the N.Y.P.D. has alienated even some of his supporters. “I can’t come within four miles of him on this—it’s insane what he’s writing,” Jimmy Breslin croaked down the phone to me a while back. “Hero cops. They went on a fuckin’ sitdown strike in the park. Fuck them. They’re on the city payroll. If they don’t like it, let them go somewhere else.” Breslin, who writes for Newsday, was referring to the events in Central Park following the Puerto Rican Day Parade, when the cops, who were out in force, appeared to do nothing as mobs of young men taunted and groped dozens of women. A few weeks before this conversation, Breslin, who has worked opposite Dunleavy on hundreds of stories over the past three decades, had told me how much he liked the Post columnist and admired his work ethic. But he’d called me up to distance himself after reading a column Dunleavy had written exonerating the cops in Central Park. “Defender of the cops!” he roared. “That’s bullshit. What about the fuckin’ reader? Steve’s a nice fellow and all, but I wish he’d think it through.’’

In reply to such criticism, Dunleavy points out that, in several cases, he has been vindicated by the courts: the Diallo cops and Tom Kennedy were found not guilty; Vincent Davis’s conviction was overturned on appeal; Patricia Feerick’s sentence was quashed by Governor George Pataki. But Dunleavy’s record is far from perfect. In the early stages of the Louima case, he proclaimed Justin Volpe’s innocence—a blunder he attributes in part to knowing Volpe’s father, who was also a member of the N.Y.P.D., and refusing to believe that the son of an honest cop could act so inhumanely. Whether Dunleavy is right about Schwarz, Bruder, and Wiese is debatable. “Dunleavy tends to ignore any damning evidence against these guys,” another reporter who covered the ex-cops’ trial said. “He’s decided to see this case as a witch-hunt against cops, when it’s much more nuanced than that.”

The New York Post was founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton, and rightfully proclaims itself the country’s oldest continuously published _Daily News_paper. During its long history, the Post has boasted such writers as Walt Whitman, Washington Irving, Orson Welles, Jimmy Cannon, and Murray Kempton. In December, 1976, Murdoch bought the Post from Dorothy Schiff, an eccentric banking heiress who had owned it for decades. He remained as proprietor until 1988, when he was forced by Congress to sell the paper because he had acquired a New York television station, WNYW-Channel 5. In 1993, Murdoch was allowed to repurchase the Post after it entered bankruptcy.

Schiff’s Post was an afternoon paper with liberal politics and a circulation of about four hundred and ninety thousand. Although in format it was a tabloid, its layout was restrained and its coverage sober, with long articles about education, foreign affairs, and other serious subjects. Murdoch changed all that. He was determined to produce a conservative, mass-market paper that could cut across ethnic and geographic lines—something he had done to great effect in London with the Sun. The target was the Daily News, with its circulation of almost two million. “It was totally tribal,” Murdoch told me. “The blue-collar workers, the Irish and Italians, they all took the Daily News. The middle classes, the Jewish in particular, the schoolteachers, the Post was their paper. When we went door-to-door with the Post, the News readers would say, ‘We don’t want that Commie rag here.’ But our old readers stuck with us, and we managed to grow the circulation gradually.” With Murdoch in command, the Post added a morning edition, right-wing editorials, and some Fleet Street sizzle. Stories were cut, headlines and pictures enlarged. There was less weighty analysis, to say the least, and more crime, more celebrities, more sports. This type of journalism was hardly unheard of in New York—Pulitzer and Hearst had pioneered it almost a century before—but it hadn’t been seen much since the demise of the Daily Mirror, in 1963, and some people were outraged. Time showed Murdoch as King Kong atop the World Trade Center.

The Post’s focus on crime led to accusations of race-baiting, but it was timely, and in Dunleavy Murdoch had a sterling crime reporter. Dunleavy arrived at South Street just as Son of Sam was terrorizing the city with a .44-calibre revolver. Breslin, who was then at the News, seemed to own the story—the serial killer had even written to him—but Dunleavy produced dozens of “exclusives,” some of them merely whipping things up, others breaking real news, such as when he posed as a bereavement counsellor and obtained an interview with the family of one of the victims. One of the questionable stories was a dramatic front-page appeal to Son of Sam to give himself up—to the Post, not to the police. Coverage of that nature was labelled “irresponsible” by an article in this magazine, to which Dunleavy replied at the time, “Look, all I have to say about The New Yorker is that, when we had the big blackout, The New Yorker covered it by writing about Diana Vreeland having to dine by candlelight.”

On August 11, 1977, the day after David Berkowitz was finally arrested, the Post sold more than eight hundred thousand copies. Dunleavy marked the occasion in typical grisly style by interviewing John Diel, the boyfriend of one of Berkowitz’s victims.

**{: .break one} ** John Diel exploded in anger when he heard that police had arrested a man they believe to be Son of Sam. “I wanna feel the guy’s blood, I wanna put my hands around his throat and I want him to know he would be dying by my hands... I want to eat... yeah, eat the guy with my mouth.” **

In 1978, Dunleavy was put in charge of the newsroom. “He was fulfilling his mission from Rupert Murdoch, which was to reëstablish the Post as a right-wing paper,” Alexander Cockburn, who was then the Village Voice’s media critic, opined to me recently. “Dunleavy was like Rupert’s dog. Rupert would set him on people, and off he would go.” Cockburn took great pleasure in lambasting the Huns marauding on South Street, though he now concedes that it was “like a dog pissing up against a lamp post” for all the notice Dunleavy took.

Dunleavy freely admits that he had a mission to change things. He thinks things needed changing. “When I took over the desk, there was a virus in the newsroom called the Columbia School of Journalism,” he said. “Everyone, with the exception of a few old guys—such as George Carpozi and Cy Egan—was liberal. They all wanted to work for the New York Times or the Washington Post.” Some of the disenchanted moved on, others were ignored, as Dunleavy educated the young reporters in the tabloid art of shocking and amazing the readers on every page. “We used to joke that he had just twelve types of story—a heroic this, a brave that, a lucky guy, a tragic kid, and so on,” Dick Belsky, who was the Post’s city editor from 1980 to 1988, told me. Dunleavy started work at eleven in the morning and didn’t leave until after midnight. Most nights, Murdoch would call for an update on the following day’s paper. When he had delivered it, Dunleavy would often go to a local bar till dawn, then return to the office and grab a few hours sleep on a couch before starting work again.

The refashioned Post didn’t please the purists—”a force for evil,” a writer in the Columbia Journalism Review fulminated—but it reflected the views of many in a city where the white middle classes were fleeing to the suburbs and the tax base was crumbling. At a time when most newspapers were shedding readers, the Post’s circulation almost doubled. Without much of a promotional budget, the paper’s main marketing device was its front-page banner headline, known inside the paper as the “wood.” (It was called that because of the big oak letters used to typeset it.) New readers were attracted by woods such as “BOY GULPS GAS, EXPLODES,” “GRANNY EXECUTED IN HER PINK PAJAMAS,” and, classically,“HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.” Dunleavy didn’t write that headline—its author was Vinnie Musetto, who now writes the Post’s Cine File column—but he contributed in other ways that aren’t taught at Columbia. One evening, a captured villain was due to be “walked” outside a police precinct so that press photographers could get a shot of him. It was too late for the Post’s first edition, and Dunleavy was worried that the News, which had a later press time, would get the picture alone. To prevent this from happening, he called the police precinct, disguised his voice, and threatened to kill the suspect if he came outside. The photo call was cancelled and the News didn’t get the picture. “The days and nights we put in, it was horrendous,” Dunleavy recalled wistfully. “But I can never remember having so much fun.”

The Post today is very different from the paper that Dunleavy worked on in the nineteen-seventies and eighties, and not just because it’s now exclusively a morning paper. Like New York, the Post has been gentrified. The blaring headlines and bitchy gossip columns remain, but where once there were gory crime stories, there are now long articles about expensive handbags and media mergers. Instead of targeting the News, the Post increasingly sees itself as an alternative, or second read, for affluent Times readers who tire of the paper’s earnest tone, liberal politics, and sheer bulk. The Post’s weekday circulation is about four hundred and forty thousand, more than it was a few years back, but well below the figure reached in the late seventies and early eighties. (One thing hasn’t changed: the Post still loses bags of money—upward of twenty million dollars a year, according to some estimates.)

Dunleavy could easily be seen as an anachronism in the yuppified Post. Somehow, he manages not to be, partly because he is so enterprising, partly because the city he writes about is not quite so white collar or so deracinated as its cheerleaders like to think. Dunleavy is supposed to contribute three columns a week, but he often ends up writing four or five. By seven-thirty or eight, he is leaving messages for Maralyn Matlick, the editor who manages the Post’s city desk five mornings a week. One day a while back, I met Matlick at a coffee shop in the Post’s building. It was a couple of days after a crime in which old New York had reared its fearsome head. At a Wendy’s in Queens, seven employees had been bound in the basement, gagged, and shot in the head. The suspected shooter, John Taylor, was a former Wendy’s employee who had skipped bail on a previous armed-robbery charge. “Today’s supposed to be Steve’s day off, but he’s been calling me every fifteen minutes,” Matlick told me. “He’s got the court papers on the suspect’s history. I don’t know how he did it, but he gave me the names of every judge who ever touched the case, the prosecutor, and he’s working on the defense lawyer. As of when I left, he was going to write about how the court system screws up in cases like this.” Matlick paused. “He will work a story more enthusiastically than any cub reporter. I’ve never once heard him say, ‘Why am I still doing this sort of stuff?’ I’ve heard it many times from reporters half his age. If I call him at six-thirty in the morning and say, ‘Steve, there’s a big story in Brooklyn,’ he just says, ‘I’ll be right there.’ And he never asks the way.”

The next morning, Dunleavy’s picture byline, which is more than a decade out of date, appeared above a column detailing why Taylor “should have been behind bars.” A few days later, Dunleavy quoted Rick Lazio, the Republican candidate for the United States Senate, calling for the death penalty in the Wendy’s case. The occasion gave Dunleavy an opportunity to remind Post readers of his own considered opinions on capital punishment:

**{: .break one} ** The Queens district attorney, Richard Brown, should right now be shopping for twin beds. Well not really beds—gurneys on which you strap humanity’s filth and jab them with the needle of ultimate night. **

If there isn’t a big news story running, Dunleavy may file one of his political columns. Typically, he will assault, in pretty much hysterical terms, one or more of the following: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, Janet Reno, Ted Kennedy, Al Sharpton, David Dinkins, Jesse Jackson, Ralph Nader, Ron Kuby, Tom Hayden, Jane Fonda, Rosie O’Donnell, Spike Lee, Barbra Streisand, Alec Baldwin. (In a recent column filed from Los Angeles during the Democratic Convention, he described Hayden as a “bonehead,’’ a “wacko lefty,” and an “aging toothless tiger of a tired hippie era.”) Some of Dunleavy’s colleagues suspect him of carrying on the hallowed Fleet Street tradition of writing what the proprietor wants to read. “If Rupert Murdoch was a Communist, Steve would be a bomb-throwing Marxist,” one Post veteran assured me. Dunleavy, for his part, says he has been a conservative for as long as he can remember. Certainly, he has been churning out right-wing screeds for a long time. When he wrote for the Star, his weekly column, “This I Believe,” was so right-wing that a John Birch Society gave him its American of the Year award despite the fact that he wasn’t a citizen. Age hasn’t moderated him. Earlier this year, he was at a party thrown by Esquire when Mark Green, the Democratic public advocate, walked in and greeted him. “Mark, mate, I love you,” Dunleavy said. “I love the way you talk. I love the way you smile. But, as far as your politics go, I’m going to fuck you every way I can.’’

In 1986, Murdoch plucked Dunleavy from South Street and sent him to his fledgling television network, Fox, where he was setting up “A Current Affair,” a nightly news magazine staffed largely with Australian and British tabloid reporters. After a decade on the Post news desk, Dunleavy found himself on national television, with a suitcase full of Murdoch’s money to pay interviewees. He made the most of it. When Jessica Hahn, mistress of the televangelist Jim Bakker, promised “Nightline” an exclusive interview, Dunleavy rushed to her house, told a driver from ABC that she had been taken to the hospital, and later grabbed the interview for himself. After William Kennedy Smith was arrested on a rape charge in Palm Beach, Dunleavy flew down and filmed so many reports that the Times published a piece saying that the Smith trial was as much Dunleavy’s story as the Scopes trial was H. L. Mencken’s. And when Amy Fisher shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the head, Dunleavy helped turn the sordid Long Island love triangle into a long-running soap opera that, at times, appeared to run exclusively on Fox.

Since it was cheaply produced, “A Current Affair” made a lot of money. The show’s success attracted imitators, such as “Inside Edition” and “Extra,” which made its once outrageous content seem routine and, eventually, stale. Management of the show was gradually shifted from New York to Los Angeles, and in May, 1995, a new team of executive producers was hired. On June 1, 1995, Dunleavy was summoned to a breakfast meeting and told he was out; a few months later “A Current Affair” was cancelled. Dunleavy has no doubt who was to blame for its demise. “The moment that the suits in L.A. wanted to take over ‘A Current Affair,’ that was the death knell,” he told me. Two Fox executives in particular provoked Dunleavy’s ire: Lucy Salhany (“a very brilliant salesperson who suddenly thought she was a journalist”) and Barry Diller (“a brilliant guy, but he was no more a journalist than a frogman is an astronaut”).

Conspicuously missing in the list of people Dunleavy blamed for what happened to “A Current Affair” was the man ultimately responsible for its cancellation. “Rupert Murdoch cannot cross the ‘t’s and dot the ‘i’s on everything in the world, and he does have respect for his executives,” Dunleavy insisted to me. When he returned to the Post after being fired from “A Current Affair,’’ however, he was deeply hurt. Colleagues recall him sitting in the smoking room and muttering darkly about all the money he had made for Murdoch over the years. When I asked Murdoch about what happened at “A Current Affair,” he surprised me by expressing sympathy for Dunleavy’s view. “The Hollywood toffs all got ashamed of it, and moved in and took control of it, put in other people and really destroyed the character of it,” he said. “I should have stepped in.”

Some of Dunleavy’s friends believe that after he left “A Current Affair” his drinking got still heavier. Even at the Post, where Dunleavy’s boozing is cherished as a symbol of the paper’s outlaw reputation, his behavior after he returned started to raise eyebrows. There was the morning when Gladys Suarez, an editorial assistant, was walking around the near-empty newsroom distributing newspapers. As she came across Dunleavy’s cubicle, Suarez eyed Dunleavy’s cadaverous form slumped across his desk, face down. Under the desk, another man was prostrate. Thinking the worst, Suarez ran back into the newsroom and shrieked, “There’s two men dead! Call 911!” A few minutes later, several members of the Fire Department emerged from the elevator. One of them seized Dunleavy, who is all skin and bones, and shook him vigorously. Dunleavy eventually opened his eyes, emitted a breath reeking of stale alcohol, and asked sheepishly, “Where’s the fire, mate?’’ (The body under the desk belonged to another Australian journalist, Mark Morri, who was visiting the Post on an exchange program. The previous evening, Morri had enrolled in Dunleavy’s orientation course for antipodean reporters seeking fame and fortune in New York.)

That incident might have been forgotten if Dunleavy had not attracted unwanted attention from the authorities again, earlier this year. In late January, he was arrested for being drunk and disorderly at the Des Moines airport, where he was attempting to catch a United Airlines flight to Manchester, New Hampshire, to cover the Presidential primary. One afternoon at Langan’s, I asked Dunleavy about his mishap in Iowa. He said he had been drinking to celebrate his sixty-second birthday and had become agitated with the airline ground staff, because on the outward leg of his trip his flight had been diverted to Cincinnati. “All I said was ‘You better get me to Manchester. You fucked me last time around, you better not fuck me again,’” he explained. “They said, ‘You’re drunk.’ Three guys came out. They were surrounding me. Some idiot kept on sticking his belly out and pushing me around. I gave him a little whack with my elbow, nothing too painful.” According to some accounts, the person Dunleavy manhandled was the pilot. Dunleavy denies it. What is certain is that the police were called. When they arrived, they asked Dunleavy to blow into a bag. He told them he was “too drunk to take a Breathalyzer,” but eventually acquiesced. The cops took him to a station house and placed him in a cell with some other drunks, one of whom recognized him from “A Current Affair.” After sleeping it off, Dunleavy _Post_ed three hundred and twenty-five dollars’ bail and went on his way, thinking little of it until he reached the East Coast and saw the story of his arrest in a faxed copy of the Des Moines Register.

The story was picked up by the News, and eventually it reached the ears of Murdoch, who was not at all pleased. “Mate, if you and I did that forty years ago, nobody would have turned a hair,” Dunleavy said forlornly. “If every time you and I got drunk and into a fight it had ended up in the papers, they’d have been cutting down forests in Finland to cover it. But times have changed, I recognize that. That’s why I don’t drink anymore on the road. I’m terrified, terrified.” Shortly after telling me this story, Dunleavy ordered another vodka-and-tonic to calm his nerves.

The sentencing of Charles Schwarz, Thomas Bruder, and Thomas Wiese took place at the federal district court in Brooklyn late in June. Dunleavy got up even earlier than usual and took the six-o’clock train into Penn Station. For once, he was less than immaculately turned out. A greenfly bite had prevented him from shaving, and he looked unkempt. The hearing was scheduled for ten o’clock, and Dunleavy was worried that he might not get in if he didn’t arrive early. When he reached the courthouse, it was seven-forty-five, and there was only one person waiting. For the next two hours, Dunleavy greeted people connected with the defendants. Guy Molinari, the Staten Island borough president, shook his hand. Andra Schwarz stopped to give him a quick kiss, as did Charles Schwarz’s mother. “Hello, darling,” she said. “This is a tough day for me.”

“I know it is, love,” Dunleavy replied.

At about nine-thirty, reporters were allowed up to Judge Eugene Nickerson’s courtroom, on the sixth floor. Abner Louima’s family were sitting on a bench outside the court, but Dunleavy made no attempt to speak to them. (As far as I could tell, he didn’t even recognize Louima’s mother.) Eventually, Louima himself arrived, with Al Sharpton and a few others.

Schwarz was sentenced first. Before he was put away, he made an impassioned statement that sounded eerily like one of Dunleavy’s columns. “This case was about many things, but it was never about justice,” Schwarz declared. Judge Nickerson, who is eighty-one, was unmoved. Speaking in a low voice, he said a jury had found that “Schwarz put his foot on Louima’s mouth to silence him when he cried out after Volpe kicked him in the groin, and then lifted him by the handcuffs while Volpe sodomized him.” For this crime, Schwarz, though less culpable than Volpe, deserved fifteen and two-thirds years in prison. Bruder and Wiese were up next. They, too, proclaimed their innocence and stressed the services they had performed as cops. Judge Nickerson acknowledged their exemplary prior records, but said that in view of their convictions he had little choice but to give them each five years in prison, the maximum allowed. The sentences were not unexpected, but Dunleavy was outraged at Judge Nickerson. “Jesus Christ, that guy’s senile,” he said to me outside the courtroom after the sentencing. “I couldn’t even hear him. He’s senile.” We walked down the corridor and ran into Al Sharpton, who was equally outraged, in his case about Schwarz’s defiant statement and the fact that he had received only fifteen years in jail, instead of the maximum possible term of life.

“What do you think he should have got, Al?” Dunleavy asked.

“He should have got the max,” Sharpton replied. “Volpe couldn’t have done it by himself.”

Dunleavy and Sharpton have been enacting scenes like this for a decade or more, going all the way back to the Tawana Brawley trial. They both know their roles, and they both enjoy playing them. Dunleavy is the defender of the white working class, the sons and daughters of Daily News readers, whose families moved from Brooklyn and Queens to unfashionable towns in Westchester and Long Island. Sharpton is the defender of the inner-city blacks whom the whites fled from, the immigrants, the sharecroppers’ great-grandchildren. Neither group has much of a say in today’s New York, but they are still out there by the million. Dunleavy and Sharpton, for all their faults, go to places like Bushwick, Morrisania, Islip, and Massapequa, listen to the people who live there, and give them a voice.

Before going downstairs to register his outrage for the television cameras, Sharpton squared up in front of Dunleavy and did a bit of shadowboxing. When they had quit clowning, Sharpton said he would offer Dunleavy a razor to shave himself but he was afraid that Dunleavy might cut his throat. “I’d only use a razor to cut your throat, Al,” Dunleavy replied cheerfully. After Sharpton had gone, Dunleavy smiled. “In a funny way, we get on quite well,” he said. “We’re like the best of enemies.”

Despite the tough punishment handed out to Bruder and Wiese, Dunleavy’s efforts on their behalf were not wholly in vain. A few days before they were due to start serving their sentences, the U.S. Attorney’s office decided not to oppose bail pending appeal, which means the two cops won’t go to prison for at least a year. Dunleavy was delighted. A few Sundays back, I drove out to Lido Beach to see him. The town, small and narrow, sits along the Atlantic between Long Beach and Point Lookout. Dunleavy’s home turned out to be a handsome Mediterranean-style house on a third of an acre, with a red tile roof, a leafy garden, and a shaded pool. The ocean was just a block away. “At least, I’ve got something to show for sixty-two years,” Dunleavy said as he led me down to his basement study, where he was trying to file his column for Monday. “We don’t even lock the door. The people who live across the street are called Bonanno, and Tommy Gambino lives just down the block.”

Dunleavy’s desktop computer, which he installed last year, was acting up, so he shouted to his wife, Gloria, and asked her to awaken their twenty-eight-year-old son, Sean, a freelance cameraman, who was sleeping off a hangover. Sean came down, bleary-eyed, and fixed whatever was wrong. “Thanks, mate,” Dunleavy said as Sean went back to bed. After Dunleavy had sent in his column, this one protesting the potential release of a New Jersey cop killer who had served just thirty-six years in jail, he grabbed a couple of Budweisers from the fridge, and we moved outside to sit by the pool. Gloria, a self-assured fifty-three-year-old blonde, joined us. She married Dunleavy in March, 1971, after having met him a few months earlier in Costello’s. I asked her what Dunleavy was like back then. “Younger,” she replied, with a sharp smile. “No different. Just younger.”

Dunleavy picked up a cordless phone and called the Post city desk to check on his column. “Is Joe there?” he asked. “Myron, don’t be a fuck. Joe Cunningham.” While Dunleavy was talking to his editors, I asked Gloria, a retired real-estate agent, what it has been like to live for so long with a husband whose nicknames include Street Dog and the Rogue. “Exhausting,” she replied. In the past, Dunleavy was often away on assignment, sometimes for months. “I think it’s good to be apart, in retrospect,” she said. “It’s not the same thing, day in, day out.” After Dunleavy had finished checking his column, which he had read back to him line by line, I asked him to name the best story he had ever worked on. He refused, saying he tries to bring the same level of enthusiasm to every story. When I pushed him further, he mentioned Chappaquiddick, Son of Sam, and John Zaccaro, Geraldine Ferraro’s husband, whose alleged business ties to the Mafia were revealed by the Post. But Dunleavy was much keener to talk about his latest project: a biography of Generoso Pope, the controversial figure who founded the National Enquirer and helped create the modern era of tabloid journalism in America. In his basement, Dunleavy has boxes containing dozens of interviews with Pope and his associates. “I haven’t been through it all yet, but there’s lots of gangsters, sex, and newspapers,” Dunleavy said.

If the book works out, it might provide a new career for Dunleavy. After playing the roles of tabloid newspaperman, tabloid television host, and tabloid controversialist, he could now adopt the role of tabloid historian. Somehow, though, it is hard to see him giving up daily journalism. As I drove back to the city, I was reminded of something Jimmy Breslin had said to me in our first conversation, when he was still being nice about Dunleavy. “You’ve gotta like the news business. You’ve gotta love it. I mean, I went to the Wendy’s shooting. I couldn’t not go there. There’s something about working in that way, you never get sick. I had a flu in 1968, and I haven’t had a thing since. The daily surprises of the news business keep you going, keep you well. It’s the only thing keeping Dunleavy going. If he ever stopped, the alcohol would drown him, he’d clutch at his throat, and he’d be gone.” ♦

Under the southern portion of the city exists its negative image: a network of more than two hundred miles of galleries, rooms, and chambers.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.